I leave for two weeks and you all accidentally the market. I was not able the participate in the Odyssey speculation, but I am enjoying catching up on it.

The wild swings that we are seeing in the Moon and Ice markets due to Odyssey adjustments made me reflect on the stability of the items that I trade.

I used my historical database to come up with a report to provide quantitative insight to help give values to the items that I instinctively know are high risk. Here is a snapshot of the lower and upper items listed in my Stability Report that covers three years of trading sorted by standard deviation (σ).

Here are some general observations about the items listed:

Basic minerals, ammo, and modules are the most stable.

Capital modules weigh in somewhere in the middle.

Tech2 ships fill the upper band of the report.

Tech3 hulls and associated Subsystems are randomly spread over the middle band.

Certain battleships are high on the report because their popularity has changed over time due to shifting fleet doctrines.

The Procurer BPO was an item that I speculated on heavily during the last patch, which netted very positive results.

Capital ships are subject to large swings due to mineral price changes.

A tenant of becoming a good trader is minimizing your risk while trying to maximize your rewards. My advice for new traders is to work with more stable items as shown in the shaded green area of my report; they are subject to less swing and therefore will help minimize risk. As your ISK resources grow, you can move into riskier items that will [hopefully] yield larger returns.

Module, gun, ship construction and trading proceeded as it did the previous year. With reliable income from trading, we expanded our operation into heavy construction by adding a Carrier construction wing to our operation.

From these numbers we can see that our operation is facing more competition as margins were slightly lower than the previous year. To overcome this, we migrated our inventory to higher per-sale profit items. The drastic change in quantity can be explained by dropping Ammo as a common trade item.

This overview shows the benefits of spreading your trade load between high ticket, low volume items and more volume centered low price items.

Quick Numbers

Q1 and Q2 saw renewed vigor into trading as I started to invest more time into logistics and product research.

Q3, July especially, was a record breaking time as I took any liquidity and moved it back into assets. This also marked our shift into high ticket items. Additionally, at this point in the year my trading partner and I had a lot of time to devote to our operation.

September into October is a busy time for me personally. I took a long vacation October and was away from Eve for a few weeks. Everyone needs a break and our performance numbers directly show this.

Invested 133 days of training into Racial Cruiser Construction V and Jury Rigging V to enable Tech 3 hull and subsystem production in the coming year.

Invention

Though there are profits in invention, I found the process of gathering materials, inventing a BPC, putting the component parts together to be uninspired; I had no real focus this year with invention. Most of the time I spent in this area was spent making Drones and increasing my stock of -1/-1 Anshar prints for a rainy day.

My two invention characters have 4-4-4 skills. I have found the training return of getting 5-4-4 or even 5-5-5 skills to marginally increase profits. Since the train time to get a Science skill to 5 is around 20 days, I have not felt the need to sink time into polishing off the skills.

I did keep a database record in order to produced the below summary of my invention statistics The overall success average came out to be 48.2%, which falls in line with any invention guide.

High Meta

With the addition of Faction, Deadspace, and Officer modules to the market, I saw several trading opportunities throughout the year to work with these items. I had little to no interest in using the tedious contract system to trade these items so when they were added to the general market, I rejoiced.

Here is a summary of the performance of items by Meta levels. Faction and Deadspace items traded well and brought consistent high profits.

Escalation Barge Teiricide

With the changes to mining barges in the Escalation patch, my partner and I mainly targeted the Procurer hull as its build requirements changed the most with the patch. We speculated that the new barges would cost more post-patch so we build a large stock before patch day.

We ended up selling 288 units for a profit of 2.48 B. We put a smaller amount of effort into Retriever hulls and managed to build and sell 44 for a profit of 431 M.

Fear the Sabre

I had limited success with trading other racial Interdictors. The Sabre is the champion of them all and hopefully we see some further balancing to these hulls in upcoming patches.

Alpha Maelstrom to Rail Rokh

This year we saw the popularity of the Alpha Maelstrom as a viable Nullsec fleet composition fade away in favor of the Rail Rokh. I was slow to react to this change and by the time I got my Rohk BPO researched to an acceptable level, the switch to the new doctrine was already underway.

Rigs and Guns

The core rig types (Trimark, CCC, and Field Extender) continued to be a solid performer. If you sell a ship in an area, you should also sell related rigs to popular fits. Let this be a lesson in item cross-selling for anyone building, stocking, and selling ship hulls.

The core gun types seen below also provided some income over the year.

GoonSwarm Shrugged, I Smiled

During the GoonSwarm Ice Interdiction, I speculated on POS fuel and turned a profit. I made 648 M doing some passive trading in Jita on Oxygen Isotopes. In addition, people started to panic and predict that other Isotopes were going to be affected also. I made some early buys on Nitrogen and then sold them off at the height of their price level.

High Meta

I have focused on and found a number of High Meta items that have proven to be very profitable. I’ve blanked out the names of them because I don’t yet want to disclose the item types at this point in time.

Implants

As expected implants were a high performer.

Standard Modules

High volume modules provide a small source of income as working with these items means you are in a competitive and often saturated market.

The new Drone Damage Amplifier modules sold very well, but I had poor success with the Reactive Armor Hardener.

Batch Ammo

I have continued to have limited success with ammo. I have found the velocity of trading to be very slow which I think is due to the nature of ammo production and consumption.

Since ammo jobs are batch based (meaning that when someone runs a production job they are producing a large bath of ammo rather than a single unit), production has periods of high volume. Additionally when someone buys ammo, that person tends to buy a large stock and slowly work though the pile.

I keep stocking ammo with the intention that it will move, but I always am unimpressed by the numbers.

Tier 3 Battlecruisers

The popularity of the Tier 3 BCs remains high as I was able to make a profit on every racial type of them. Surprisingly the Oracle and Talos have been outselling the Tornado.

HAC Favoritism

The Cerberus has remained a poor performer with no production or trading opportunities arsing this year. The Ishtar remains a strong seller as a preferred AFK mission ship while the Vagabond holds up the PVP end of the HAC spectrum. I fully agree with Kirith Kodachi’s recent comments on the upcoming rebalance initiative that will eventually hit HACs.

Tech 2 Logistics Falling From Grace

With the recent rebalance of Tech 1 logistics, I expect my production and trade of Tech 2 logistics ships to decline. As Jester pointed out, the proficiency of the Tech 1 variant can cheaply replicate the Tech 2 variant.

Future Ventures

Champion CREST API changes and development with the community to enable 3rd party tools to flourish.

Pressure the CSM for industry and mining changes.

Though the Carrier project is new, it is proving to be profitable so we expect the expand the operation. We are going to look into Dreadnought production in addition to carriers.

tl;dr Using mineral compression enables you to haul the minerals needed to built 344 battleships in one Jump Freighter.

Heavy Industry

When I started playing, I knew that I wanted to be a builder; I wanted to become an industrial gear in the alliance war machine providing materials to advance the cause.

At the height of the Northern Collation, the Alpha Maelstrom was king. The ability to deliver bursts of coordinated damage in high lag situations was the method to win battles.

Over the life of the Northern Collation, I built and sold around 344 Maelstrom ships in Cloud Ring, Pure Blind, and Deklein.

You might assume that these were hauled in from Empire or built from nullsec minerals, but that is not the best way to operate. I’ve wrote about mineral compression before, but now I wanted to disclose my building operations with a concrete example now that my Maelstrom production line has been retired.

Side note: TEST officially announced the end of Maelstrom reimbursements yesterday. RIP bucket of rust with solar sails.

344 Battleships

The volume of raw minerals equals around 48,800,000 m3 (140 Jump Freighters or 55 Freighters) of hauling if you were to bring them in uncompressed. Even given perfect jump skills, this would eat up 2.1 B worth of Isotopes using the jump path I took to my production system, effectively killing your profits.

If bringing in the minerals is a Herculean task, what about bringing in the built ships?

Built ships have a better compression ratio. 344 Maelstroms, if hauled in from Empire to Nullsec, comes out to 17,200,000 m3 (49 Jump Freighters or 20 Freighters). Moving built hulls would bring fuel costs down to 764 M, but you can still do better.

1,000 425 Railgun I’s

Taking minerals in empire, compressing them into modules, and refining in nullsec is the best way to transport large quantities. 1,000 425 Railgun I’s equal 10,000 m3 of space yet produces around 1,407,000 m3 when refined (!).

This screenshot shows what you can achieve in a station with a 50% base refine and high refine skills. You could even push the yield to perfect by getting better standings (details and math here) with the station corporation.

Using only 425 Railgun I’s will leave you with a disproportional lack of Tritanium for battleship builds. Other items, such as the Passive Targeter I, can be used to balance out your needs.

I’m following the trend that Rixx Javix started and posting my goods. As mainly a trader and researcher, I don’t feel like I have a large fleet of PVP ships as I try to maintain a lean operation. ISK goes back into trading and manufacturing operations instead of sitting as a rusting Minmatar hull in a hangar.

I’ve blanked out the majority of my ship name but I’ll let you know that I name them all after Babylon 5 ship classes.

Trade Alt

This character sits in Jita 4-4 and moves and/or ships items around. I think of this guy as the holding account.

(396) Various capital part BPCs left over from copying capital part BPOs for passive income
(293) Various Tech1 BPCs left over when I used to do Invention
(14) Invented Tech2 module BPCs
(5) Invented Anshar (ME -1) BPCs for JF building
Ishtar, Onyx, Phobos, Pilgrim Invented BPCs

(1) Freighter
(2) Jump Freighter
(1) Orca
(5) Iteron Mark V

Long-term Storage

Research Alt

This character is working with around 290 BPOs worth around 13.59 B. I’ve always wanted to be able to produce anything in the game so I bought up the majority of the common module, frigate, and cruiser prints. The only Battlecruiser prints that I own is a set of the Tier3 ones. I have no intention to ever produce Drakes/Hurricanes due to their small profit margin. I also don’t own any Battleship prints as I like to fly T1/T2 cruiser hulls.

Awaiting ME/PE research

Getting things done

Research alt junk drawer

Capital Bittervet Pilot

Capitals in lowsec and random Bombers

Random PVP ships

Random PVP gear

Subcapital Pilot

I’m training this character to fly all four racial Interceptors, Recons, Logistics, and standard BCs. I also have him trained for the standard T2 Alpha Maelstrom because it is such a common request in nullsec fleets.

Out of the spreadsheets and into the fire! I have always been interested in the ebbs and flows of power in nullsec and as such, I have a subcapital character in TEST for participation in the pony giggles.

I saw a Jabber announcement go out for a fleet that worked perfectly for me — after US dinner, before bed.

A lot of firsts happened on this fleet. It was my first official non-kitchen sink/random home defense subcapital fleet, the maiden voyage of my T2 Alpha Maelstrom (finally have Large Projectile Turret V), first time using optimized overview settings, and my first nullsec final blow.

(don’t laugh all you PVP’ers — I’m going to try to do a battle report)

Alpha > Scimitar > Huginn formup in Fountain. 140 in fleet mainly consisting of a Maelstromball with fast tackle support that headed into Delve. We encountered and played catch-up/evade/backtrack with a Nulli Secunda AHAC/T3/Dictor gang of about 100. Now blue’d Pandemic Legion joined us on a few jumps as we played around with the Nulli Secunda gang.

Three major encounters resulted in us blapping their ships as they came through gates while being tailed.

Once we jumped through, our Alpha Maelstroms pulsed MWDs and sat at optimal using Depleted Uranium L (1.2x tracking) ammo while fast tackle stayed on gate to lock down targets.

After a few T3s, some Guardians, and all their Dictor were down, they retreated home while we reinforced a few structures with the help of PL.

I was easily able to flip between friendly/hostile/warp points and the color highlighting really helped when identifying targets. I recommend trying this theme out if you have any issues with your current Overview setup.

Raiden. has stood down in Tenal and the CFC is currently working through structure grinding in order to conquer it. According to my intel channels, Tenal will be back in RAZOR Alliance‘s hands in 2 weeks.

I find the current Tenal situation reminicent of the CFC Branch campaign. After a few major battles, White Noise. stood down and the only thing left to do was to structure grind. Hundreds of Maelstroms and Supers were used to blob and grind.

In order to express the magnitude of work that needed to be done, a unit of measurement was coined.

Maelstrom Hour – noun.
The amount of damage a T2 gun, perfect skill, and always in optimal Maelstrom produces in an hour.

20 Billion HPs were required to conquer Branch, which comes out to about 7,407 Maelstrom Hours. Given an average fleet size of 100 Maelstroms, that equals 148 hours of fleet time — or over 6 days of non-stop shooting (credit for this post goes to Lake on Kugutsumen.com for the research).

With sovereignty being looked at in the upcoming expansions, there cannot be more higher HP structures. The answer to this mechanic has always been n+1, bring more of the things.

What are the alternatives?

I’m not an expert on Dominion-style sovereignty warfare so any links to constructive threads would be welcome.

Visions of power come in many forms in the Eve universe. Some people aspire for political wealth and the ability to spin the wheels of war with a few verbal orders. Others find power in numbers, the blinking of a wallet ever increasing towards a higher value.

I have always identified with the industry people, who wish to put disparate pieces together to create something grand. Ammo to Jump Freighters — I’ve built them all and have quite the journey.

In March of this year, I hit a new milestone as I saw my net value pass 100B for the first time.

Carebear Stare

As I reflect, I find the notion that I once held of an Iteron V being a masterful machine to be almost comical. Powerful Mining lasers from a Navitas frigate don’t seem to bring me the same thrill as before.

Now I am playing with what I consider to be the real industry and market people, who shift prices en mass and send ripples down the chain. I can now fund large conflicts and build something from nothing.

For one individual, vocal clout on comms provides wealth. For me, the work I am doing to drive conflict with money is far more entertaining.

The Vast Unknown

All journeys start with a decision that drives change. In 2008, fresh to the space opera, I found myself making small amounts of gains in highsec and eager for larger things. One day a corpmate approached me and lured me into unknown space with the promise of riches.

The introduction of wormhole space brought new fields of ABC ores to the galaxy. As my wormhole corporation climbed up the class ladder from a C3 into a C6, we grew in mining, production, and salvage efficiency.

In early 2009, the number of roaming gangs and gankers was drastically smaller than the current numbers. We would often mine for hours without seeing another incoming connection forming. The field was new and full of new mechanics that are drastically different than aged nullsec.

We used newly discovered mechanics to keep ourselves isolated. Knowing that not warping to an outgoing connection will keep it despawned, helped keep our isolation from neighbors. When we saw a new signature from a nosy neighbor, we used the mass of our carriers and battleships to collapse the connection.

Isolation kept the Arkonor flowing and with each jetcan worth 14M ISK, our wallets fattened. We purchased carriers, a Rorqual, battleships, and funded second or third characters.

Clicking on Planets

Liquid ISK, which was created by piles of Megacyte mined in wormshole space, gave me the capital for my next venture.

I speculated heavily on the PI market before the Tyrannis patch. When NPC orders were removed, it paid off. I put 10B into NPC items such as robotics, construction blocks, coolant, and mechanical parts. As the prices peaked, I sold off the stock pushing my net worth up to 20/25B.

Market Epiphany

Another breakthrough came when I took up missioning as a side interest.

Running L4 missions.
Hmm, I need ammo and to rig this Dominix.
Hmm, why are rigs 3M more than Jita.
Hmm. Hmm. *click*
I should stock this mission hub.

Major Performers

Playing with Large CCC’s in major market hubs was my first journey into market PVP. I was able to 0.01 competitors out of the market and slowly saw the number of people competing with me in mission hubs go from 15 to maybe 5 or 6. I don’t have exact numbers, but this is my guesstimate based on the aggression of 0.01’ing.

These are the core rigs as I call them. Almost all ships will be rigged with a Trimark, CCC, or a Field Extender.As you can see, the price of them has fallen. The introduction of the Noctis has pushed rig prices down over the past year. Sadly, my profits on these items have been shrinking in line with the rig prices.

Salvage all the things! The Noctis was a huge seller for me and continues to be a powerful performer.I find that with new ship introductions, especially when the fulfill a role better than their predecessor, there is a huge amount of profit to be made. The Noctis replaced the salvage Destroyer for many people.

To my surprise the Ishtar has been a high performer. Despite not seeing these as standard nullsec doctrine ships, they sell well both in nullsec and in mission hubs. The Ishtar fills the role of your semi-AFK mission/belt ratter.

As lag remained a constant in Eve, the sheer power of an initial barrage of ammo from Maelstrom cannons took hold.In 2011 the standard T2 Alpha Maelstrom was a hot item. I have sold my BPO and reduced my involvement with battleships, mainly due to the fluctuating mineral market, yet the Alpha Maelstrom still remains a standard nullsec ship.

When people buy Capital ships in lowsec, they often want to fit their ship with a few modules. If you produce capitals in lowsec, be sure to stock the same station with common modules such as Armor Repair, Remote Armor, Remote Energy, Shield Transfers, and racial fuel. Also stock plenty of Cap Recharge and Power Relay modules as many people go for a travel fit out of their purchasing system.

Advice

Close Jita local and pretend it does not exist.

Expansions breed change. Pay attention to leaked patch notes, and review for manipulation attempts. If there is a change to loot drops proposed, get on the test server and figure out the refine value or use the static data set that CCP provides.

Stay away from the Official Eve Online forums, especially for market information. The reliability and quality of information is far too low.

Take a risk and do something that you have never done before. Some of the most important trade data or inspiration has come out of new aspects of the game that I have never attempted before such as large 500 person fleet fights, mission running, or Incursions.